Misaligned metrics

Phil Smith at QPC Group explores the gap between the boardroom and the contact centre

 

Measuring customer experience (CX) can deliver valuable insights to the business but that’s not what’s happening in the majority of organisations today. Instead, businesses are divided, using one set of metrics in the boardroom and another in the contact centre, which means key performance data is being missed along with opportunities for improvement. 

 

In the C-suite, the Net Promoter Score (NPS), along with the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, reign supreme, as executives are often incentivised on improvement. NPS is used to measure customer loyalty, brand affinity, and future revenue potential but it was never meant to be used in isolation.

 

In The Ultimate Question 2.0, Fred Reichheld, its creator, uses a medical analogy where he compares NPS to a thermometer. He suggests that while it can tell you the patient’s temperature, it can’t diagnose the malady or offer a course of treatment. So, while NPS can provide a view of customer sentiment it can’t provide enough data to inform a course of action.

 

NPS also suffers from significant limitations when applied to day-to-day operations. The data typically arrives days or weeks after the customer interaction, making it too slow for real-time course correction. Furthermore, response rates to NPS surveys are often below 10%, leaving most interactions unmeasured and running the risk of sampling bias.

 

 

Different priorities

Meanwhile, in the Contact Centre, agents and team leaders are rarely exposed to NPS. Their world is based upon performance metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT), Service Level (SL), and Adherence.

 

The name of the game here is efficiency and how quickly calls are dealt with. Contact centre agents become focused on internal performance and increasingly detached from how their behaviour might be impacting loyalty or brand equity. Put simply, its sees quantity placed over quality.

 

Both sets of metrics have their place but they don’t provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience nor align boardroom strategic imperatives with the day-to-day operation of the contact centre. It’s a situation made all the more challenging by the fact that not all the contact data is collected. Different channels (voice, web, chat, email or third parties) are handled by different systems, each of which collates only the base data it perceives to be of value to drive these traditional service-level based metrics. This can see incidents such as dropped contacts, multiple customer calls, partial resolutions, escalations and deflections at best summarised, at worst ignored.

 

Capturing this friction can often reveal that contacts reported as having been ‘handled’ have in fact used twice the amount of resource. This is because abandoned IVR calls or multiple bot interactions will then be followed by a voice call. It’s not uncommon for customer journeys to restart three or four times due to broken orchestration in the CX process, impacting customers as well as the bottom line.

 

 

The missing metric

Intelligently collating all data provides a much more realistic view of how convoluted the actual customer experience is and how efficiently the business is operating. It’s this data that has now allowed the industry to truly understand CX and come up with the ‘missing metric’, fully aligned and correlated to NPS, the ‘Customer Effort Score’ (CES).

 

CES is generated across all customer interactions and journeys based upon the amount of friction the customer meets along the way. So, a typical journey might start with an IVR call, see the customer directed to a self-service bot, then speak to a live agent, only to be transferred to a colleague where they are put on hold and then need to repeat themselves before their query is resolved.

 

CES increases based on the customer experiencing high effort events where the customer has typically attempted to contact the company on numerous occasions, has been navigating ineffective self-service Voice or Chat BOT’s, or has been transferred or put on hold, etc. Each of these events is given a weighting by an algorithm according to the intensity of the effort and when it happened sequentially to establish a score with root cause and context for every contact.

 

 

Joint benefits

The resulting CES has an extremely high correlation with NPS, so it becomes of value to both the board and the contact centre. The contact centre and digital teams focus on improving performance and processes to reduce CES, so the Board then has confidence that this will positively impact NPS.

 

The Board can also use the underlying data and context to the CES to gain a more accurate picture of what led to the NPS and why. It can interrogate that data to show where friction is occurring at key points in the process or at specific times of day. But it can also use that data to address key points of failure and to streamline the process, operationalising CX to gain competitive advantage.

 

As insights are generated in real-time, the business can become more sensitive and responsive to customers, enabling contact centre agents to not only respond on a more personal level with context, but even to predict when a customer might be about to churn. Corrective action can then be taken.

 

In the contact centre, CES can be tracked in real-time and made available to agents so they respond appropriately. Agent interactions are then assessed not on how quickly they beat the clock but by how many high-effort calls they’ve had. If, for instance, an agent had four high effort calls in a week, two of which were due to transfer delays, this could be flagged to the Team Leader who would coach that agent on how to address those delays.

 

Equipped with CES, both the C-suite and agents can use these metrics to more productively address performance in CX, eliminating blind spots for the boardroom and daily friction at the frontline. It can complement existing metrics by providing some much-needed real-time insight into the customer journey.

 

New CES-oriented metrics also act as enablers,  moving the contact centre to a more CX focused culture that is more proactive and even predictive.   

 

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Phil Smith is CEO at QPC Group

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Jacob Wackerhausen